


The 1998 Job

by FletcherHonorama



Category: Leverage
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Gun Violence, Murder, Pre-Canon, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-08-11 23:49:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20162155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FletcherHonorama/pseuds/FletcherHonorama
Summary: It's 1998 – ten years before Victor Dubenich approaches Nate with an offer he can't refuse. Here's what the team is getting up to.(Note: rated M for Eliot's chapter only - all the rest I would consider General Audiences or Teen and Up)





	1. Sophie [with French]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note this chapter takes place in France and though the narration is in English, the majority of the dialogue is in French. If you would prefer to read the English-only version of this chapter, please skip straight to chapter 2!

He was looking at her and thinking of himself, himself, himself, and it was nauseating. Sophie liked the man she’d come in with, Marc Guillaume Matei, short and dark with a strong roman nose and an impeccable beard, but theirs was a relationship of mutual convenience and it had already come to its end. Marc always turned up to parties with a beautiful woman on his arm as a sarcastic nod to heterosexuality and then went full camp for the rest of the event. This suited Sophie perfectly because all she needed was an invitation, an introduction and then to be left to her own devices.

Marc was standing by the window drinking and flirting with a very striking red-haired young man dressed in soft greys and blues. They had been seated next to each other at dinner, with Sophie on Marc’s other side, and though she’d principally been occupied attaching herself to her mark, a well-heeled uncultured idiot called Fabrice Régnier, through judicious eavesdropping on Marc and the object of his affection she’d picked up a sizeable number of new fashionable phrases and half a dozen very clever innuendos to add to her repertoire. 

Tragically, Sophie’s mark wasn’t the type to appreciate a single one of them. Objectively, Fabrice’s features were handsome, his figure was fine, and someone had given him a very sleek haircut. He was wearing a suit worth, to Sophie’s eye, well over five thousand francs. In theory, Fabrice was a very eligible bachelor, and so it was perfectly plausible that Delphine Beaumont, a young woman foolish enough to come to a party with Marc Guillaume Matei, would form an attachment to him – on the rebound, as it were. 

All that Fabrice was lacking was personality, culture and class. Dinner had been an agonising hour and a half of self-aggrandising speeches, botched witticisms, blunt personal questions and utterly inadequate table manners. Inhabiting silly naive Delphine had been a thankless slog so far, but now that they were free to roam the house, Sophie could finally get down to business.

This wasn’t Fabrice’s usual party scene. He was a sorry square among bohemians tonight, having come to meet some very particular people for a very particular reason. How this overgrown fourteen-year-old with the grace and style of Sophie’s childhood basset hound thought he had any right to buy the original _Le déjeuner des canotiers_ privately off the black market, take it away and display it in his hideously modern _maison de maître _in Alsace was utterly beyond belief, but Sophie’s intelligence was impeccable, and that was exactly what he was here to do.

It was barely even theft, what Sophie was doing here tonight. The painting was on the black market; it had already been stolen. She was stealing it, yes, but she was stealing it _back_. She was being paid extremely handsomely to do it, but the true reward would be in seeing Fabrice Régnier deprived and the heathens who would consider selling a _Renoir _to such a witless self-important philistine punished. 

She was a sort of avenging angel, viewed in a certain light.

That thought was all that was getting Sophie through this interminable conversation. Fabrice had been circulating the room for a while, puffed up like a red robin at having a bright young heiress on his arm to show the world. She had laughed merrily at his pathetic _bons mots_ – _oh oui, oui, t’es tellement drôle, Fabrice –_ covered his every gaffe with a joke of her own and smoothed out for him each and every one of the conversational wrinkles he had such a knack of creating.

As the evening wore on and Fabrice’s dear friend M. Legrand continued in his oh-so-unexpected and unfortunate absence, he sought out less and less conversation with others in the room, preferring to stand by the fireplace with Delphine and tell her stories about his travels. Since they had been so ensconced, the same man – a dangerously thin young man with tired eyes and stooped shoulders – had come up to him twice in the last half-hour, held a whispered conversation and left again. Both times, Fabrice had insisted to him that yes, yes, his friend would be arriving soon. It was a little touching and quite pathetic, the faith he had in a man who Sophie had personally redirected two days earlier with no more than the promise of a job interview with a playwright friend of hers in Toulouse.

Sophie was frankly astonished that Fabrice had held onto his family money for as long as he had. He was quite obviously not an intelligent man, and there was certainly no shortage of grifters in Europe. Surely soon he would realise that his intended translator would not be coming tonight and he would have to improvise. The sellers wouldn’t wait for him all night, and they certainly wouldn’t deign to conduct their business affairs in French and thus lose the clear advantage they had over him. Sophie had dropped enough hints about her American education and sprinkled enough English words into their conversation that even a dullard like Fabrice should be able to see the opportunity that was right in front of his eyes.

When the whispering man came and left for the third time and Fabrice’s head started to droop, it was clear that Sophie would have to hint a little louder. She nestled herself in by his side, inviting his arm to wrap around her waist. “Quelque chose ne va pas, Fabrice? Une mauvaise nouvelle?”

“Non, ma cherie,” he said, sounding utterly despondent. “Il n’y a pas de quoi s’inquiéter.”

“Not my problem, hein?”

“Pardon?”

“Oh, pardonne-moi, Fabrice. Parfois j’oublie que –”

“Delphine,” he interrupted, pushing her away a little and turning her to face him directly. A sudden hope shone brightly in his eyes. “Tu parles anglais, n’est-ce pas?”

Sophie could have done cartwheels. “Mais oui, Fabrice,” she said with a little surprised giggle. “I speak it – ah, comment dit-on – like a native, you know? I have had the boyfriends in America, and I knew one very clever girl in London when I was a little younger. We played tennis, si tu vois ce que je veux dire.” She threw him a saucy little smile.

The pain on his face soothed Sophie’s soul. He would never admit to her that he had no English at all, and he was far too slow-minded to cover for his ignorance in any believable way. He knew perfectly well the conversation had veered into the risqué – she’d bloody telegraphed it hard enough – and all he could do was flounder. Flounder and gape.

Sophie had to make her own fun where she could; the naturally-occurring type was dreadfully thin on the ground tonight.

Once Fabrice had collected himself, laughed a merry unconvincing laugh and been rewarded by one of Sophie’s flirtiest smiles, he got down to business. “Delphine, tu sais, mon anglais n’est pas aussi bon que le tien,” he said in shameless understatement, “et j’ai une petite problème. J’ai un peu d'affaires que je dois faire ce soir, et mon collègue qui parle anglais, il n’est pas encore arrivé, et je sais pas pourquoi. Je serais toujours dans ta dette, Delphine, si tu pouvais venir et traduire pour moi. Je veux acheter une peinture précieuse, et il y a une américaine qui veut l’acheter aussi. Elle va entrer en France demain, alors il n'y a pas de temps à perdre.”

“Ça alors,” said Sophie, her hand on her heart. “Quel drame!”

The flicker of anger on his face, quickly shut away, confirmed to Sophie what she had suspected from the moment she met him. Somewhere deep down, Fabrice Régnier was aware of his many deficiencies, and a woman who made him feel foolish brought his impotent rage right to the surface. If he didn’t currently need Delphine to close his deal, or if he was with a woman who wasn’t quite the actor Sophie was, this evening might go very differently. 

Sophie was going to very much enjoy stealing from him.

“Delphine, ma cherie,” said Fabrice, all smiles now. “Vas-tu m’aider?”

“J’suis pas du tout une femme d’affaires, Fabrice,” Sophie said. “Un de tes amis peut pas t’aider?”

Fabrice shook his head and lowered his voice. “Tous ces hommes sont mes concurrents,” he said. “Je peux pas leur faire confiance, tu comprends. C’est toi dont j’ai besoin, Delphine. Je pense que t’es une femme très intelligente, et ton anglais est très impressionnant. Et tu es belle aussi! Ta beauté va les distraire, et je vais donc faire une bonne affaire.”

“D’accord!” said Sophie, turning her head as if to hide a blush. “Je vais traduire pour toi. T’es un vrai flatteur, Fabrice.”

“Merci mille fois, Delphine,” he said, taking her hand and kissing it gently. “Tu m’as sauvé la vie.”


	2. Sophie [all English]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note this chapter is the all-English version of chapter 1. _Italics_ has been used to represent dialogue spoken in _French_. Non-italicised dialogue is in English.

He was looking at her and thinking of himself, himself, himself, and it was nauseating. Sophie liked the man she’d come in with, Marc Guillaume Matei, short and dark with a strong roman nose and an impeccable beard, but theirs was a relationship of mutual convenience and it had already come to its end. Marc always turned up to parties with a beautiful woman on his arm as a sarcastic nod to heterosexuality and then went full camp for the rest of the event. This suited Sophie perfectly because all she needed was an invitation, an introduction and then to be left to her own devices.

Marc was standing by the window drinking and flirting with a very striking red-haired young man dressed in soft greys and blues. They had been seated next to each other at dinner, with Sophie on Marc’s other side, and though she’d principally been occupied attaching herself to her mark, a well-heeled uncultured idiot called Fabrice Régnier, through judicious eavesdropping on Marc and the object of his affection she’d picked up a sizeable number of new fashionable phrases and half a dozen very clever innuendos to add to her repertoire. 

Tragically, Sophie’s mark wasn’t the type to appreciate a single one of them. Objectively, Fabrice’s features were handsome, his figure was fine, and someone had given him a very sleek haircut. He was wearing a suit worth, to Sophie’s eye, well over five thousand francs. In theory, Fabrice was a very eligible bachelor, and so it was perfectly plausible that Delphine Beaumont, a young woman foolish enough to come to a party with Marc Guillaume Matei, would form an attachment to him – on the rebound, as it were. 

All that Fabrice was lacking was personality, culture and class. Dinner had been an agonising hour and a half of self-aggrandising speeches, botched witticisms, blunt personal questions and utterly inadequate table manners. Inhabiting silly naive Delphine had been a thankless slog so far, but now that they were free to roam the house, Sophie could finally get down to business.

This wasn’t Fabrice’s usual party scene. He was a sorry square among bohemians tonight, having come to meet some very particular people for a very particular reason. How this overgrown fourteen-year-old with the grace and style of Sophie’s childhood basset hound thought he had any right to buy the original _Le déjeuner des canotiers_ privately off the black market, take it away and display it in his hideously modern _maison de maître _in Alsace was utterly beyond belief, but Sophie’s intelligence was impeccable, and that was exactly what he was here to do.

It was barely even theft, what Sophie was doing here tonight. The painting was on the black market; it had already been stolen. She was stealing it, yes, but she was stealing it _back_. She was being paid extremely handsomely to do it, but the true reward would be in seeing Fabrice Régnier deprived and the heathens who would consider selling a _Renoir _to such a witless self-important philistine punished. 

She was a sort of avenging angel, viewed in a certain light.

That thought was all that was getting Sophie through this interminable conversation. Fabrice had been circulating the room for a while, puffed up like a red robin at having a bright young heiress on his arm to show the world. She had laughed merrily at his pathetic _bons mots_ – _oh yes, yes, you’re so funny, Fabrice_ _ –_ covered his every gaffe with a joke of her own and smoothed out for him each and every one of the conversational wrinkles he had such a knack of creating.

As the evening wore on and Fabrice’s dear friend M. Legrand continued in his oh-so-unexpected and unfortunate absence, he sought out less and less conversation with others in the room, preferring to stand by the fireplace with Delphine and tell her stories about his travels. Since they had been so ensconced, the same man – a dangerously thin young man with tired eyes and stooped shoulders – had come up to him twice in the last half-hour, held a whispered conversation and left again. Both times, Fabrice had insisted to him that yes, yes, his friend would be arriving soon. It was a little touching and quite pathetic, the faith he had in a man who Sophie had personally redirected two days earlier with no more than the promise of a job interview with a playwright friend of hers in Toulouse.

Sophie was frankly astonished that Fabrice had held onto his family money for as long as he had. He was quite obviously not an intelligent man, and there was certainly no shortage of grifters in Europe. Surely soon he would realise that his intended translator would not be coming tonight and he would have to improvise. The sellers wouldn’t wait for him all night, and they certainly wouldn’t deign to conduct their business affairs in French and thus lose the clear advantage they had over him. Sophie had dropped enough hints about her American education and sprinkled enough English words into their conversation that even a dullard like Fabrice should be able to see the opportunity that was right in front of his eyes.

When the whispering man came and left for the third time and Fabrice’s head started to droop, it was clear that Sophie would have to hint a little louder. She nestled herself in by his side, inviting his arm to wrap around her waist. _“Is something wrong, Fabrice? Bad news?”_

_“No, my dear,”_ he said, sounding utterly despondent. _“Don’t worry about it.”_

“Not my problem, eh?”

_“Pardon?”_

_“Oh, pardon me, Fabrice. Sometimes I forget that –”_

_“Delphine,”_ he interrupted, pushing her away a little and turning her to face him directly. A sudden hope shone brightly in his eyes._ “You speak English, don’t you?”_

Sophie could have done cartwheels. _“Why yes, Fabrice,”_ she said with a little surprised giggle. “I speak it – _ah, how do you say it_ – like a native, you know? I have had the boyfriends in America, and I knew one very clever girl in London when I was a little younger. We played tennis, _if you know what I mean_.” She threw him a saucy little smile.

The pain on his face soothed Sophie’s soul. He would never admit to her that he had no English at all, and he was far too slow-minded to cover for his ignorance in any believable way. He knew perfectly well the conversation had veered into the risqué – she’d bloody telegraphed it hard enough – and all he could do was flounder. Flounder and gape.

Sophie had to make her own fun where she could; the naturally-occurring type was dreadfully thin on the ground tonight.

Once Fabrice had collected himself, laughed a merry unconvincing laugh and been rewarded by one of Sophie’s flirtiest smiles, he got down to business. _“Delphine, you know, my English is not as good as yours,”_ he said in shameless understatement, _“and I have a small problem. I have a bit of business I have to do tonight, and my colleague who speaks English hasn’t arrived yet, and I don’t know why. I would be forever in your debt, Delphine, if you could come and translate for me. I want to buy a valuable painting, and there’s an American woman who wants to buy it too. She’s going to come into France tomorrow, so there’s no time to lose.”_

_“Goodness,”_ said Sophie, her hand on her heart. _“What drama!”_

The flicker of anger on his face, quickly shut away, confirmed to Sophie what she had suspected from the moment she met him. Somewhere deep down, Fabrice Régnier was aware of his many deficiencies, and a woman who made him feel foolish brought his impotent rage right to the surface. If he didn’t currently need Delphine to close his deal, or if he was with a woman who wasn’t quite the actor Sophie was, this evening might go very differently. 

Sophie was going to very much enjoy stealing from him.

_“Delphine, my dear,” _said Fabrice, all smiles now. _“Will you help me?”_

_“I’m not a businesswoman at all, Fabrice,”_ Sophie said. _“Can’t one of your friends help you?”_

Fabrice shook his head and lowered his voice. _“All these men are my competitors,”_ he said. _“I can’t trust them, you understand. It’s you that I need, Delphine. I think you’re a very intelligent woman, and your English is very impressive. And you are beautiful too! Your beauty will distract them, and so I’ll get a good deal.” _

_“All right!”_ said Sophie, turning her head as if to hide a blush. _“I will translate for you. You’re a real flatterer, Fabrice.”_

_“A thousand thank-yous, Delphine,” _he said, taking her hand and kissing it gently. _“You have saved my life.”_


	3. Eliot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for gun violence and murder. In this chapter, Eliot kills a guy in cold blood. I don’t like it any more than you do.

Ever since Eliot had flown out of Albania with three bullet wounds, two fingers still in splints and the book – sorry, the _tome_ – in his carry-on luggage, a different type of client was starting to get in touch with him.

Albania hadn’t been his best work. He was still getting used to the different parameters he had to work with in retrieval, and he’d made half a dozen mistakes, two of them serious, and ended up killing three or four guys he really shouldn’t have had to and getting shot a hell of a lot more times than he’d planned as well. Now he couldn’t go back to Aimee like he’d planned, because three simultaneous fresh bullet wounds was more than he was willing to explain to her. He’d promised her March, and it was already May. By the time he’d healed up enough to pass his injuries off as nothing it would be June. He could feel something in him sinking, and he didn’t want to look at it too closely to find out what it was.

It was easier just to focus on work, which was definitely on the way up. He was starting to get a lot less _who the hell is Eliot Spencer? _and a lot more _Spencer? You mean the Gjirokastra Spencer? _People were starting to recognize him without any introductions, and the jobs they were offering him were on a different level. He hadn’t even been in retrieval that long, and he’d thought Albania would’ve been a black mark against his name, but apparently spreading a bit of gratuitous blood around on the job was a ticket straight to wetwork.

In Eliot’s experience, retrieval usually involved a certain amount of collateral damage. Sometimes it was openly encouraged and sometimes to be avoided if at all possible, but every job carried with it the possibility that he’d have to get his hands real dirty. Eliot had known that going in, and he had no qualms about it. He’d served his time in the army and he knew what it was to kill a man. He’d done it for government money and he could do it for private money. It was naive to think there was any fundamental difference between the two.

So he’d taken this job. It was just work. He was sitting here in the back seat of a car that wasn’t his with three guns, a pair of binoculars, a crossword and a headache, and if everything went according to plan, by the end of the night he could rightly be considered a professional assassin. Eliot just wanted to get it over with. His sister’s birthday was next week and he had to send her at least a postcard to mark the date. His hair was starting to get into his eyes; he badly needed it cut. One of his boots had a damaged sole, and it gave him a hell of a distinctive footprint. 

He had plenty on his to-do list, but until he’d finished this job everything else was on hold. A solo assassination in a foreign country wasn’t the kind of thing a man should be hurrying. He’d been staking this place out for two weeks, and he was sick of it: sick of the street, sick of watching these people, sick of his own company. Killing people wasn’t hard, but it could be messy, and the only way to minimize that mess was to put in the prep work.

What was hard was trying to remember how he’d used to smile at his girlfriend before this had been his life. He couldn’t really remember the things they’d used to talk about right at the beginning, when he was the star quarterback and she was the most beautiful girl in school who hated football and scoffed at the thought of dating a jock but made out with him every day in her truck before and after school and told him she loved him on the day they graduated.

Had they used to talk back then? They must have. They’d argued a lot, but Eliot was fuzzy on the details. He’d just thought it was hot the way she got mad, when her cheeks got pink and she focused right in on him, determined to come out of each and every argument on top. He’d always been saying stupid things, trying to pick a fight with her because he knew what it usually led to. And she’d liked it as much as he had, or she wouldn’t have kept rising to the bait.

Eliot knew there was a fight waiting for him when he finally got back to her, and it had been a long, long time since their fights had been fun.

So he stopped thinking about it. He flipped through his notes. Michałek Kowalczyk’s wife had been home all day, which was normal for a Thursday. The two kids, both girls, had come home right on schedule at 1630. They’d played outside for an hour, waving sticks around and roaring and screaming about _smoki_. Their mom had had to yell at them to come inside but eventually they had, pushing and shoving each other trying to be first through the door. They wouldn’t be out again for the rest of the night.

The best-case scenario was for Eliot to get this guy straight out of his car, before there was any chance anyone else would get hit. A double-tap to the chest, then one in the head to finish it off. That was how Eliot saw it going down, but he had plenty more guns and he was ready for a chase if that’s what it came down to. It might even help him blow off some steam.

The porch light came on, and Eliot dropped lower in his seat. That light came on like clockwork every night at 1900, but Eliot checked his watch anyway. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do than check and double-check every detail. 

It was right on 1900, of course. If the man of the house only had the same kind of respect for routine as his wife did, Eliot might have gotten away with one week’s prep instead of two, and he might have a window of readiness tonight narrower than the four whole hours between 1930 and 2330. 

Cars drove past every now and then, but none of them were the Daewoo Eliot was listening out for. He slouched back and watched thin grey clouds pass over the moon. He couldn’t even occupy himself with stupid adolescent thoughts about werewolves because (a) he wasn’t a stupid adolescent, and (b) the moon was barely even gibbous yet. The moon had been full in Albania, Eliot remembered. He wasn’t going to use it as an excuse for what had happened over there, but he’d made – 

There it was. A ’96 Daewoo Tico at the end of the street, approaching at 20 miles an hour and easing gently to a halt not fifteen feet away away from Eliot. Kowalczyk was earlier today than he’d been in the last two weeks, but that suited Eliot just fine. It wasn’t like he wasn’t ready. Now he might even have time for a decent night’s sleep before his flight back.

Eliot rolled his window down with one hand and reached for his gun with the other, as Kowalczyk switched off his engine.

He timed his shots to coincide with the slamming of the door: two bullets right in the middle of his back. One went through, hit the car and richocheted; the other didn’t. Eliot hauled ass out of the car and crossed the street in half a dozen steps. Kowalczyk was twitching facedown on the asphalt, blood pooling underneath him. Eliot could smell the piss on him already. The spatter on the car looked brown, not red, under the streetlights. Eliot put two bullets in his brain, just to be safe, and was in the front seat of his borrowed car in seconds, cruising out the way Kowalczyk had come in.

This stuff wasn’t hard.


	4. Hardison

Everyone was hacking the Pentagon these days; Alec had decided he was going to do it before he turned thirteen. It was going to be the biggest hack of his life so far, and he was itching to get it done. He’d spent months developing his plan and polishing it to perfection, and then he’d had to keep on sitting and polishing it for weeks after he had every detail perfect and ready to go. His birthday was getting dangerously close now – 19 days away and counting. Alec didn’t like cutting it so fine – _teenagers _had hacked the Pentagon before, but _zero_ twelve year olds ever had – but it was kind of important, with something like treason or whatever this was, to wait for _exactly_ the right moment. And so far it hadn’t come.

The biggest problem was Jonny kept coming over after school. The problem with it was that Alec liked Jonny, and he really, really wasn’t in a position to turn down a friendship freely offered. He’d tried to in the beginning, when he’d learned that Jonny loved Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Taylor Hanson and Titanic-ass Leo di Caprio and didn’t even bother to hide it. Alec already dealt with enough bullshit at school without adding a gay best friend to the mix, and that was exactly what he’d said to Asher when she’d called him out on it.

Nana had raised hell when she found out. That was the thing about always living with between two and five other kids in the same home – every single thing you ever said got back to Nana eventually. Maybe she’d heard it from Asher, maybe from Maurice via Asher, maybe from Shaun, who was gone now but had spent every second he’d been at the house eavesdropping and then snitching his little heart out.

She’d torn Alec to shreds that day, all in front of everyone, and nearly a whole year later he still wasn’t fully recovered. He might never be. Two things about that whole sorry affair had really stuck with him. Firstly – and this one had come from Nana – people who actually wanted to spend time with you because they liked you were valuable as hell, and only a rolled-gold idiot would choose his friends according to what other people thought. Secondly – and this one he’d worked out all on his own – no good ever, ever, ever came out of talking back to Nana when she’d worked up a head of steam. 

But anyway, that was all ancient history now. Nobody really wanted to be Alec’s friend except Jonny, so that made Jonny his best friend. Mostly they goofed around and played God-awful duets on violin and harmonica until they got yelled at, and then Jonny would take a nap while Alec finished Jonny’s homework, and when Jonny woke up again he’d do Alec’s Spanish for him. They talked about computers and cartoons and video games, and when the weather was good Jonny let Alec go on his skateboard even though he really really sucked at it. Jonny only ever laughed at him a little bit.

Jonny had even tried to help Alec with a girl he liked, which was – you know, Alec appreciated the sentiment but it proved Jonny really was as dumb as he looked, believing a girl like Tanya Bridges would ever in a million years look twice at Alec Hardison, the biggest most uncool nerd this side of the Appalachians – hell, on the entire east coast, probably. Like, really. He was five feet tall, played the violin and was always only one false move from getting the shit kicked out of him by a rotating roster of like ten alpha male wannabes with one brain in aggregate between them. 

Alec lived in _care._ He had _allergies. _Him and Tanya Bridges, actual angel? Hilarious.

And next year he was going to be a high school freshman at thirteen, so things were only going to get worse from here. He really needed to get the hell on with _growing_, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like Nana didn’t feed him.

Or, you know, maybe older girls would like short geeky black boys who spoke computer and played violin. Maybe high school girls watched Buffy and Babylon 5 and they’d heard of Neon Genesis Evangelion but never been allowed to watch it, and then he could show them his full set of bootleg videos, all neatly labelled as a series of computer science instructional videos, and things could – well, they could go on from there.

But for now he hung out with Jonny, who had a big-ass mouth and always wanted to know everything that was going on. It hadn’t been so big a deal when he’d let slip to Nana about the Sunday morning Mario Kart tournament or when Alec’s whole gym class had found out he was claustrophobic and he got stuffed into three different lockers over the next two weeks. That kind of stuff happened anyway – maybe it wouldn’t happen as much if he didn’t hang with Jonny, but it still would happen – and at least with Jonny around, Alec had someone who was on his side.

So Jonny was a hassle but the friendship was worth it, really, just so long as he never found about the things Alec most needed kept secret. His fake violin scholarship, for one. His thriving cash-for-schoolwork business, for two. The size of his internet empire, for three. And fourthly and most importantly, Jonny Blabbermouth Muñoz Curtis could not_ ever_ know about Alec’s plans to, you know … hack the Pentagon.

So when Jonny invited himself over to Alec’s place after school like usual on Friday, Alec shelved his plans for yet another day.

“I need to use the computer,” Maurice said as soon as Alec walked through the front door. Maurice was fourteen, had been living with them for more than a year, and he was _still _mad that the computer was in Alec’s room, even though Nana always, always made Alec share it. If he didn’t let people in his room to use the computer, then Nana would make him move the computer out into the living room, and then he would be completely and utterly screwed. Why couldn’t Maurice just win a prestigious programming competition with a computer for a grand prize his own damn self. That’s what Alec wanted to know.

“For what?”

“For none of your business, shrimp.”

“Alec, is that you?” Nana called from the back of the house.

“Yes, Nana,” he answered, dumping his schoolbag on the floor and sliding past Maurice without another word. Jonny put his bag down next to Alec’s and trailed along behind him.

Out back of the house, in their poky little garden with one single rosemary bush, Nana was just pulling down the last bit of laundry from the clothesline. “Good afternoon, Jonny,” she said.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said Jonny.

“Help me with this basket,” said Nana, and dumped it right on him.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, swaying backwards under the weight of it.

“Alec, your school called me this afternoon,” Nana said, putting her hands on her hips. “What you got to say for yourself?”

“Uhhh,” said Alec. He hadn’t even done anything recently, not really. Nothing new, anyway. Nothing bad.

“You been talking back in math class?”

Aw, hell. Mr Cordillero. How was he supposed to explain Cordillero?

“He’s just bitter Alec’s smarter than he is,” Jonny said. 

“Jonny, man –”

“You’re showing off in class?” Nana said, her eyes going glinty. “We’ve been over this, Alec.”

“He was screwing up exponential decay, confusing the hell out of everyone,” Alec told her. “Everyone was gonna learn it wrong.”

“You ain’t the teacher, Alec,” Nana said. “You gotta stop causing trouble for yourself in class.”

“Cordillero does it all the –”

“_Jonny,”_ Alec whispered. “_Stop helping_.”

Jonny looked at Alec, shook his head and went inside with the laundry.

“I don’t want to hear about this kind of thing again,” said Nana. “There ain’t no calling yourself smart if you just use that brain of yours to get in trouble. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Alec. 

“Now, let Maurice use your computer this afternoon, and don’t hassle him about why.”

“Can’t he –”

“Let him use the computer and don’t argue with me about it. You can do your violin practice, and then you and Jonny can go on the Nintendo. You don’t need to be on that computer all the time.”

“I got a project, Nana,” Alec said, sensing an opportunity. If Maurice was on the computer all afternoon, then if Alec had anything he needed to do, it’d have to be pushed back until after dinner. Alec usually didn’t get to go online after dinner, since it tied up the phone line – and because he was twelve and he had a bedtime – but it _was_ a Friday night, and if he was selflessly, graciously letting Maurice take up his afternoon computer time, then that had to count for something in Nana’s eyes. “I gotta dial up for it. Can I tonight, after Maurice?”

“You know Asher calls Travis on a Friday night,” Nana said.

“Asher calls Travis every _single _night,” Alec said, which was pretty much true. But if that was the only obstacle Nana was putting in front of him, then he had it. He _had _it.

“Nana!” Tina hollered from inside. “VCR ain’t working! Is Alec back?”

Nana never ever answered a holler, but Tina was seven and she was only a few months in the house, so she still hadn’t learned.

“Once Asher’s done can I dial up?” Alec said. “Once everyone’s done with the phone?”

“You promise me you won’t get in any more trouble at school,” Nana said sternly.

“Nana!” Tina hollered again. 

“I promise,” Alec said. “I won’t get in any more trouble at school.”

“You swear to God you won’t.”

“I swear to God I won’t.”

“And you help Tina with that video player.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And Maurice gotta be finished first too, before you go on.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And it don’t mean you can stay up all night.”

“No, ma’am.”

“That means not one second after midnight.”

“Not one second after midnight,” Alec promised. If he was as good as he thought he was – and he was _exactly _that good – there was no way it would take him anywhere near that long.

He held the door open for Nana, closed it behind the both of them and went to explain to Tina one more time that if you watched a video all the way to the end one night and didn’t rewind it, then it wouldn’t go if you just stuck it in the VCR again the next day and pressed play. He showed her how you could see what side all the tape was on and pointed out the rewind button to her. Jonny brought their bags in and left them by the TV, and they sat and waited while the machine whirred. 

Him and Jonny would watch the Lion King with Tina for a while, hold her up in the air between them, sing along to _I Just Can’t Wait to be King _and bail the hell out of there before Simba found Mufasa. That was the last thing Alec needed to see just a few hours before his hack. 

After dinner, once Jonny had gone home and Alec had bribed Asher to get off the phone, he’d head on into his room, crack open an orange soda and get to work.

Tonight was going to be the night he made his name.


	5. Parker

Parker had woken up at 4:32am and she wasn’t hungry, so she’d just come straight to the warehouse. She liked the city at this hour. It wasn’t a good time for picking pockets, considering the kind of people who were up and about, but Parker liked walking around and observing the world without all the normal people getting in the way. If someone bothered her, she had options and not much of an audience. She was getting pretty good at breaking fingers and twisting arms. She’d caved a man’s knee in last Wednesday morning and no one had even noticed. Well, he’d noticed. He’d definitely noticed. Parker could tell by the noise that had come out of him.

Eventually men would learn to stop promising Parker things they thought she wanted. She’d had men tell her they’d make her rich, make her happy, show her a good time. They offered her drugs and clothes and a place to stay. Sometimes there’d be a woman who offered to take Parker under her wing. She’d say that Parker could be just like her some day. She’d say, “Look at you,” and she’d say, “You’d clean up beautiful, I bet.” 

Until 6:45pm yesterday, no person had ever said they could make Parker the very best thief in the world. Until 6:43pm yesterday, nobody had caught Parker red-handed with her hand in their pocket. Nobody had ever caught her stealing from them and looked delighted about it. This man Archie didn’t look at her like most men did. He watched her eyes, her hands, her feet. He held his head up high and he spoke slowly and without wasting words. He’d talked to her like she was a person, and it made her kind of feel like one.

So even though it seemed like the stupidest, most unoriginal trap in the world, Parker had come to the warehouse. There were no lights and the parking lot was empty. Parker made one circuit. The building was 500 feet by 300 feet. There were no cameras, no lurking strangers. From Parker’s quick glances through dark windows, the floorspace was mostly clear. Most of the windows were intact, but a couple were damaged and one was fully broken. There were no noises and no funny smells.

Parker had brought her picks, but she didn’t need them. The big door opened easily and only creaked a little bit, and it closed just as easily behind her. There wasn’t much inside at all. A couple big metal tables, a big pile of wood in one corner. The ceiling was forty to about fifty feet at its point and supported with exposed wooden beams. The most interesting thing was there wasn’t any graffiti at all, not even a single tag. There were no sleeping bags or piles of trash or suspicious boxes. There were barely even any signs of rats.

It was obvious people knew not to come in here. But Parker had been invited and she had eighty minutes left before Archie was due to arrive. There wouldn’t be an inch of this building she didn’t know by heart by 7am.

And he did arrive at exactly seven, as he’d promised. He was carrying his walking stick and satchel and wearing another one of those suits that had drawn Parker to his pockets in the first place. An old grey-haired man in a three-piece suit who carried a walking stick should have been the perfect target. Parker’s lip curled at the memory of his hand on hers, how fast he’d moved to block off her exit. Then she’d frozen, and he had her.

He looked even older today, like a hundred years old or something. He’d come alone. Parker wondered if she’d be able to rob him, now that there was no one else around. She was young and he was old and she knew not to take him so lightly this time. 

“Good morning, kiddo,” he said, strolling towards where Parker was sitting up on one of the high tables by the broken window. The early morning sun that came through the windows bounced off the concrete floor onto his grey hair and his grey suit and into Parker’s eyes. She hadn’t thought about how the light would be once the sun came up, and she should have. It was pretty basic. “How do you like the place?”

Parker glanced around, squinting her eyes only a little bit against the sun. “It’s not very secure.”

“How many exits?”

He was halfway across to her now. “Six.”

“Cameras?”

“No.”

“None at all?”

“None.”

Parker jumped down off the table as Archie got to it, moving quickly and suddenly to see how he’d react. He didn’t even flinch at all. He put his satchel down and pulled out a big pile of papers and beckoned for Parker to come and look at them.

“Did you eat this morning?” he said, shuffling through papers. Parker leaned closer to see what they were. Floor plans, it looked like, and specs for some kind of security system. It was hard to tell when he kept moving them around.

Archie put his hand down flat on top of the pile of papers. He didn’t do it hard, not to surprise her, but Parker took half a step back anyway. 

“I asked you a question,” he said.

Had he? Parker had forgotten it already.

“Did you eat this morning? Breakfast?” he said.

“No,” said Parker.

Archie tsk’ed and shook his head. “In the future, we won’t be so much as exchanging words if you haven’t eaten. Is that understood?”

Parker struggled to follow all the steps he must have taken to get to that kind of a comment. They were going to meet again, they were going to talk, and as part of that he got to decide what and when she ate? Parker hadn’t eaten breakfast in years.

“Parker,” Archie said, a bit louder. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, even though she didn’t. Maybe she’d work it out later.

“Now, you’ve been to school?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

Parker didn’t like talking about school, not with anyone. “I don’t like talking about that.” She stared fiercely at the papers on the table to avoid seeing his reaction to that. Too much face interpretation gave her a headache. 

“You can read?”

“Yes.”

He took his hand off the papers and stood to one side. “Tell me what this is.”

Parker went and stood where Archie had been. He was still pretty close, only three feet away, and him being _right there_ disrupted her thoughts, making it so she had to go chasing them down instead of just thinking them normally. He was standing perfectly still, though, and she wasn’t getting any stabby feelings. Not yet. She just had to stay calm and keep his hands in view.

She looked at the page on the top. “Guggenheim Museum,” she said. “Manhattan, 5th and 88th. Next to the park.”

He moved that sheet to the side. Parker looked at the next one. “Whitney Museum of American Art. Manhattan. 10th and Gansevoort.”

Archie hadn’t uncovered even a third of the next one when Parker answered it. This was the whole reason she’d studied Manhattan so thoroughly in the first place. She could draw the whole thing from memory, blindfolded. “The Met,” she said. “Manhattan. Central –”

“How long have you been in New York?” Archie asked.

Parker had jumped when he’d cut her off, but she decided to play it cool and pretend she hadn’t. “How long have you?”

“Another requirement I have is that you answer the questions I ask you,” Archie said. He was starting to sound pompous and remind Parker of people she didn’t like remembering. It prickled. “There will be no answering of questions with questions.”

“That’s a lot of rules,” Parker said. She felt like telling him she hadn’t done a single thing anyone told her in months and she didn’t miss it at all, but he’d get mad. Parker didn’t need him to get mad. She just wanted to know what he could offer her.

“It’s two rules, Parker.”

“Two is a lot.”

Archie tidied the papers into one single neat stack again and turned to face her directly. He stood with a kind of confidence Parker had never seen before. She wanted to stand like that, all head up high and balanced and relaxed. Instead she could feel tension building in every single muscle and couldn’t lift her eyes more than 90 degrees from the floor. It sucked.

“Parker, you’re not a little girl,” Archie said. “You’re a young woman with a career ahead of you. I want to know if you’re willing to take it seriously. If you can’t be disciplined, you will never be everything you could be.”

Of course Parker could be disciplined. How did he think she’d gotten as good as she was already? It was called observation and practice. She worked all day every day. He should know that.

“You didn’t ask me a question,” she said, just in case he was going to criticize her again for not talking.

“I have three questions that I want you to think about carefully before answering,” he said. 

Parker sighed. “Okay.”

“One,” he said, and held up a finger. “Do you want to be the best thief in the world?”

“Yes,” said Parker. 

Archie looked at her and said nothing.

“What?”

He just kept looking at her.

“I thought about it, okay,” Parker told him. “What’s the next question.”

“Two,” Archie said, showing her the peace sign. “Are you willing to do things you don’t enjoy, that you might even hate, in order to achieve that goal?”

“No.”

The expression Archie did then was surprise. It was the first time she’d seen it on him, but it was super obvious. His eyes were wider, his eyebrows had gone closer to each other, his mouth was open a little bit. He kept blinking. “You’re not,” he said.

This wasn’t going right. Parker backed away from him three steps and was about to turn around when he held up his hand and held it out to her, palm down and fingers spread out. It was an empty hand. “Wait,” he said, and his voice didn’t have its usual ring to it. “Parker, wait.”

Parker was done talking about his rules and her weaknesses. “I don’t do things I don’t want to do,” she said. “That’s _my_ rule.”

Archie’s hand was still up in the air when he said, very sensibly and reasonably, “What if we negotiated?”

“I don’t believe in negotiating.”

He lowered his hand back down by his side. “Neither do I.” Parker looked closely at his eyes and his mouth, trying to work out what he meant by contradicting himself like that. It was confusing, and she’d been confused enough already. Then he smiled, and it was the biggest smile Parker had ever seen on him. “We’ll probably both hate it. Let’s try anyway, shall we?”

What was she supposed to do? She didn’t want to run or hide or hurt him, and that’s what she usually did when people were smiling at her. Archie was obviously trying to connect with her, but Parker didn’t know how to connect with him back. She wasn’t the smiling type.

When Archie smiled he looked kind of like a turtle. Maybe that was why she didn’t want to stab him. Who would stab a turtle?

Archie leaned his stick against one leg of the table and then pushed himself up to sit on it, like Parker had been when he came in. He didn’t bounce up like Parker would, he went smoothly so he didn’t jar his knees and hips and whatever else stopped working when you were old. But the end result was the same, and once he was up he reached into his inside pocket and took out a little spiral notebook and a pencil. 

Parker watched every tiny movement his hands made as he did it, and he watched her just as closely in return. He got some wrinkles in his cheeks that Parker thought might be part of a smile as well. Wrinkles did make it a lot easier to work out what people’s faces were doing. And as well, when people had wrinkles you could tell what kind of faces they made most often, and once you knew that you could work out what kind of feelings they felt the most. 

Maybe Parker should work with more old people.

“Why don’t you tell me your rules,” Archie said, flipping to the first page. “And then I’ll tell you mine.”


	6. Nate

Nate would have been terrified of becoming a father if it weren’t for Maggie. Fatherhood, in his experience, brought out the worst in everyone it claimed. Jimmy Ford was the opposite of everything Nate ever wanted to be, but every single waking hour, and even in his dreams, he was acutely aware of the ways his father had shaped him and still influenced him to this day. Maggie’s father had done nothing but sneer and criticize right up to the day he’d left her and her mother for the woman he’d been having an affair with for the four preceding years, and her stepfather had been little better. The men Nate worked with talked about their wives and children like they were paperwork: an unfortunate necessity of life that should be avoided and passed off wherever possible. If Nate never heard the phrase “ball and chain” ever again in his life, he’d be a happy, happy man. 

No, the best father Nate knew was Paul, but that was a cheat and Nate knew it. Paul would never be a father, not like Nate was about to be. They’d talked about it in seminary school, when they both knew Nate wouldn’t be finishing but he hadn’t yet worked up to dropping out. Paul knew what he was giving up in becoming a priest, and it was a sacrifice he was willing to make to follow his calling. Nate didn’t have quite the same knack for sacrifice.

So Nate didn’t have much idea of how to be a good father, no role models, just long, long lists of things to avoid. But when he looked at Maggie, when he heard her voice, every time the thought of her derailed him completely from what he was supposed to be thinking about, he knew he would be able to do it. He could no more let Maggie down than he could walk on water or turn it into wine. 

On his last day at IYS before he went on leave, they threw him a party. 

“You’re stuck in it now,” Jerry told him with a laugh, raising his glass in a toast. “Welcome to the club.”

“If you get lonely, you know, I’ve got some numbers,” said Wyatt with a wink and a nod. 

“Don’t get sucked into all the baby stuff,” Robert advised him, “Come back to the office as soon as you can. She’ll have you changing diapers for the rest of your life if you let her.”

“Ha ha,” Nate said. “Right.”

He lasted for nearly an hour, forcing his face into smiles, choking out fake laughter and doing everything in his power not to hit anybody. These people all knew Maggie. To her face, they respected her. Behind her back they showed their true colors, and Nate had never been more disgusted in his life. Disgusted, and offended as well. What every single one of these men was saying to him, right to his face, was that they didn’t think he had the courage to truly love and cherish his wife and the child they were going to have together. They thought he was as weak, as corrupt, as hollow as they were.

Screw them.

Nate took the elevator to the top floor and climbed the stairs onto the roof. It was bitingly cold, as it always was at this time of year, and the wind was picking up, but he desperately needed the space. It might be bad form to leave a party this early, especially one purportedly thrown in his honor, but the way Nate saw it, being _on _the building was close enough to being still _in _the building that he could call it a gray area and move on.

Maggie answered on the third ring.

“Hello,” she said, brisk and professional as always. “This is Maggie Ford.”

“Hi, Maggie,” said Nate. “It’s Nate.”

“Nate,” she said, and the warmth in her voice blasted the memory of every asshole down on the fifth floor into oblivion. “How’s the do?”

_Nightmarish_, Nate could’ve said. _Depressing. Outright offensive. _“Oh, you know,” he said. “There’s cake, so –”

“Cake?” she said. “They splashed out on cake? Malcolm’s getting soft in his old age.”

“How are you?” Nate asked. “Everything okay?”

“Yes, everything’s fine.” Someone in the background said something, and there was laughter in the room. “You’ve just won Tessa a hundred bucks,” Maggie said. “We had a pool.” More laughter. “I thought you’d make it at least to five thirty before you called.”

“Oh, well,” Nate said, torn between embarrassment and pride. He didn’t like being predictable or being laughed at, but he’d prefer Maggie’s friends see him as adorably and hilariously overprotective than think he didn’t give a crap about his wife and unborn child. Nate really hated to admit it – and never, ever would out loud – but Maggie’s friends were a constant source of reassurance to him that he was doing a reasonable job as a husband, because if he wasn’t, they would definitely not be shy about letting him know. Checks and balances.

But still, the pool thing wasn’t ideal. “Tell her my cut is ten percent.”

“He wants a cut,” Maggie said to the room. She was answered by boos and groans.

“Tell him to bring back some cake,” one woman shouted out. Tessa, Nate thought, but it was hard to tell over the phone.

“She wants cake,” Maggie relayed. 

“I’ll see what I can do,” Nate promised.

“I can tell you’re on the roof, you know,” Maggie said. “You’d better be wearing a coat.”

“Yes, of course,” Nate said, shivering. 

“Say hi to James for me.”

“Oh, he’s not –” Nate looked around, and there he was lurking in the stairwell, a glass in each hand. “Ah.”

“Go back to the party,” Maggie said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Someone in the room with her let out a _wolf-whistle_, and Nate felt his cheeks get hot. He was thirty-three, for God’s sake, and his wife of six and a half years was heavily pregnant with their child, and he was up here on the roof of his very professional office building blushing like a teenager. 

Next time he came to this building, he’d have held his child in his arms. He’d walk in a father, a new man. No wonder right now he felt half spun out of time.

Maggie had well and truly hung up by now, so Nate tucked his phone back into his pocket, noting the slight tremors in his fingers. Nervousness, excitement, cold? Smart money was on all three.

“Not very sociable of you,” said James, stepping out into the open, his shoulders hunched against the wind. He, Nate noticed, was wearing his jacket.

“You call that society?” Nate said, curling his lip and taking the glass that was offered to him. 

James shrugged and tucked his left hand into his trouser pocket, insouciant as ever. “Well if you’re not coming back, give me the heads up before you tell any of those buffoons,” he said. “I’ve got designs on your office.”

Nate grinned. “Will do.”

“Cheers.” 

They clinked their glasses and drank, and James had really busted out the good stuff here. Nate took a second sip straight after the first and looked at him curiously. 

James smiled a tight little smile and looked down into his drink. “Special occasion,” he said. “A man does only ever become a father once in his life.”

Maybe it was just the mood of the evening in combination with the whole unfathomable miracle of existence, but Nate looked at James standing up here on the roof with him in the bitter cold, toasting him with some of his very best booze, and he was moved. James Sterling was a highly unpopular man around the office with a well-earned reputation as a sharp-tongued, merciless opportunistic rat, but Nate didn’t mind him. He’d take a self-aware unrepentant asshole over those cowards downstairs any day. They hated James because they wished they could be him but didn’t have the brains or the guts. Nate had no desire to be like James Sterling in any way whatsoever, and so the two of them got along just fine.

Tonight, oddly, James looked as somber as Nate had ever seen him. Nate didn’t flatter himself James was going to miss him or that he was particularly invested in the birth of his child, but there was definitely something going on with him. Nate didn’t really want to know what it was, and he was fairly confident that whatever it was, James wasn’t going to volunteer it. That wasn’t how things worked between them. Private stayed private.

“The Pentagon was hacked again over the weekend,” James said, twisting his glass slowly around in his hand. “Another kid.”

“Jesus,” said Nate. “Again?”

“Again.”

Nate shook his head. “How old this time?”

“No suspects yet,” said James. “So they say.” 

“So how do they know it’s a kid?”

“When your hacker throws up a great big stylized letter H on your homepage and sets it to autoplay ‘Call of Da Wild’, you get an idea they’re not forty,” James said drily. Nate bit back most of his grin at the way James had said the title of the track: confident, precise and painfully, absurdly English.

James glowered at Nate, but without much force behind it. Then he pursed his lips, looking out over the city. “We need to start hiring some of these little bastards.”

Nate laughed. “Takes a thief to catch a thief?”

James grimaced. “Of course not. Thief-catchers catch thieves. But we still need to know how they work. This kid, whoever he is, could out-hack every single employee of this company with his eyes crossed and whistling Yankee Doodle. He’s probably ten years old.”

“Or she,” said Nate.

James rolled his eyes. “He _or she_ could out-hack every single employee of this company with his _or her_ eyes crossed and whistling Yankee Doodle. He _or she_ is probably 10 years old. Happy?”

“Anyway, I wouldn’t know,” said Nate. “I’m on leave.”

“You’ll be back soon enough,” James said dismissively. “And the grim march of technology will not abate.”

“And you’ll still be after my office.”

“And I’ll still be after your office.”

Nate held out his glass, and they toasted each other again. This wasn’t bad, he thought. This felt like celebration.


	7. All

Sophie stepped outside, closed her eyes and breathed in the still night air. She walked out onto the lawn, shifted her jaw around, wiggled her tongue. 

“Sure thing, honey, yeah,” she said under her breath, letting Delphine Beaumont slide away into the night and settling into Heather Myers, American fraudster and fence. She took her mobile phone and the little piece of paper from her bag. “Piece of cake. The goddamn French, am I right? Am I right?”

Peter answered after two rings. 

“Painting’s coming your way at ten thirty,” she said, her words clipped and her tone businesslike. Heather wasn’t an artist in the same way Sophie was. She didn’t bask, and she never gloated. “Régnier’s expecting it at eleven. So keep things smooth and get going.”

“Roger that,” said Peter, around his omnipresent cigarette. “Ten thirty, Régnier at eleven.”

“You got a pen? I’ve got the bank transfer details right here.”

“You switched ‘em?”

“Yeah, I switched them. Am I an idiot? Are you working with an idiot, Pete?”

“Alright, alright. I apologise.”

“Don’t bother,” Sophie said. “Just get it done.” She read out Régnier’s bank details to Peter, and he repeated them back, interrupted by only one coughing fit. At least this time he’d remembered to cover the mouthpiece of the phone.

“I’ll be in Paris by tomorrow morning,” Sophie said. “I’ll call you then, unless we have any emergency situations beforehand.”

“We won’t, boss,” said Peter. “You can count on it.”

“I am counting on it,” Sophie said, and disconnected the call.

These jobs were really getting too easy. It was time to plan something _fun._

* * *

The flight back to the States was quiet. Eliot helped an old lady from Michigan stow her luggage, flirted with the flight attendant, listened to the little boy in the seat next to him commentating Super Bowl highlights under his breath while his daddy read a Tom Clancy novel. He ate the shitty food he was given and tried to shut out the movie playing on the monitor up over the aisle.

He wasn’t sure why he felt so uncomfortable in his own skin, why every single perfectly normal interaction he had with another person was setting his teeth on edge. 

If he didn’t think about it too hard, maybe it would go away.

* * *

In the end it took Alec longer to find Asher’s bribe – a bootleg recording of one of the shows Rage Against the Machine had played with the Wu Tang Clan before Wu Tang had split from the tour – than it did for him to get in and out of the Pentagon. He’d had months to plan the hack, after all, and like two hours warning that that would be her price for staying off the phone all night. He finally found someone who could point him to the right FTP server just after 11, and the CD finished burning right on midnight. 

He carefully wrote _Asher - RATM & WTC 5.20.1997 _onto the CD, clicked it into a slim plastic case and went to slide it under her door. When he knelt down, though, he could hear quiet sobs from inside the room.

It had to be Tina. Asher had been living with Nana even longer than Alec, so he’d known her for three years and two months and, what, seven days, and he’d never seen even a single tear in her eyes in all that time. And she didn’t complain about sharing with Tina either, who kept her up crying just about every night. Asher was Alec’s single solitary point of data that proved that white girls weren’t all bad, and boy was that a heavy load to carry. 

So instead of pushing the CD through the gap under the door, Alec knocked quietly and went in. It wasn’t like he was going to sleep tonight anyway, and Asher had work in the morning.

They’d done this enough times – and not just for Tina – that neither of them had to say anything. Alec left the CD on Asher’s desk, waited for her to extricate herself from Tina’s octopus arms and then took her place in Tina’s bed. Asher stumbled out of her room to get some sleep in his.

“You don’t gotta keep watching that movie,” Alec said to Tina, even though he knew it was pointless. It had taken him a long time to stop poking at his own wounds too. “There’s other movies.”

Tina sniffed and wrapped her arms tight around him, and her legs too. “I forgot to rewind it.”

“It’s all good,” he said. “We can do it in the morning.”

“Okay,” she mumbled. “You can help me.”

“Yeah,” Alec said. “Now go to sleep, baby girl. You’re good here.”

She made a little noise, stuck her forehead right into Alec’s throat and fell asleep within a minute.

So here he was, genius hacker supervillain, enemy of the state by now probably – it wasn’t like they were ever gonna _catch _him, but it still counted – youngest ever to hack the Pentagon, black-market music mogul, foster-brother pillow.

Now all he had to do was stay on his best behavior so he could keep his computer privileges, wrangle everyone’s hella complicated telephone requirements to get himself decent time online, maybe somehow talk Nana into letting him put a lock on his bedroom door, and he’d be ready for stage 2.

The world hadn’t seen _nothing _of Alec Hardison yet.

* * *

Parker strolled through the store, basket empty in her hand. She’d spent a good hour brushing her hair back at her home base, and she’d tied it up neatly into a ponytail, and nobody was staring at her like she shouldn’t be in here. She still wasn’t convinced it was worth all the effort. From Parker’s observations over the last couple of months, there was no minimum standard of hygiene or appearance that stopped people from selling you stuff in New York.

But she had her mission, and Archie had been very clear she had to carry it out to the letter: brush her hair, wear her nicest clothes, walk into a store like she belonged there, buy a week’s worth of breakfast foods and make small talk with the cashier when she paid.

Archie had said she had to pay for the food, but he hadn’t said with what money, so on the way to the store Parker had bumped into a few people to top up her funds. She suspected Archie would approve.

Parker had already worked out what she’d say to the cashier. It had been a toss-up between, “How ‘bout them Knicks?” and, “How ‘bout this weather we’ve been having?” She’d decided on the weather, just in case there were follow-up questions. Parker still hadn’t worked out what sport the Knicks actually played. And if things went sideways, she had her get-out phrase: “Gotta dash!”

What was puzzling Parker at the moment was what counted as breakfast foods. You could eat anything for breakfast, technically, and Archie hadn’t been specific. In school Parker had learned that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, which was the main reason she’d stopped eating it.

But her and Archie had an arrangement, and if Parker wanted to become the best thief in the world, she had to eat breakfast. He’d made that very clear, and Parker had agreed to it. He was going to page her some time tomorrow for her first training session, and she’d have to have either eaten breakfast by then or be able to get it on the way.

And Parker didn’t want to be late. She also didn’t want to turn up tomorrow and have to report that she’d failed the first task Archie had given her because she couldn’t decide what counted as breakfast foods and what didn’t.

So she made a decision. She went to the shelf where all the cereal was and put one of each kind of box into her basket until it was full. She presented her basket to the cashier. 

“How ‘bout this weather we’ve been having!”

“Yeah,” he said, chewing gum with his mouth open. “That’s nineteen bucks.”

Parker gritted her teeth, braced herself and handed him two $10 bills, forcing herself to let them go without a struggle. “And the Knicks,” she said.

The cashier looked at Parker blankly and handed her her bag and her $1 change. Parker took them both from him and walked casually out of the store, like it was something she did every day. Like she belonged.

Mission accomplished.

* * *

Nate held his son in his arms and wondered how he had ever lived any other way.

Maggie was watching him through barely-open eyes, her arms resting awkwardly empty in her lap. Nate thought maybe he should pass Sam back to her, but he couldn’t bring himself to move his baby even one inch further away from his heart. Besides, Maggie had been fourteen hours in labor and Nate was at a loss to explain how she was still conscious. She needed to rest.

Maybe, like him, she was physically incapable of taking her eyes off their son.

Nate let out his breath slowly. He’d been periodically reminding himself to breathe all day. At some point, hopefully, normal oxygen service would resume. “Can I sit –”

“Mm-hmm,” Maggie said. The hospital bed wasn’t big, but once Maggie had wriggled right to the edge there was just enough room for Nate to squeeze in and sit beside her. She leaned all her weight against him, her head heavy on his shoulder, and laid one finger gently along Sam’s cheek. 

“You’re incredible,” Nate breathed into her ear. “Rest. I’ve got him.”

Maggie let out something between a hum and a sigh and nestled even closer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to both YourOzness and the_original_n_chan for their help in beta-ing this fic - it wouldn't be what it is without you <3
> 
> And thanks also to everyone who's read, left kudos and/or commented. This was fun to write and I'm glad people have enjoyed it!
> 
> Till next time!


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